Whoa, Liboff, that book... I only vaguely remember it now (took QM in 1988). I took "math for mathematicians" (Math 25) instead of "math for physicists" (Math 22?), but remember my classmates who took first year "math for physicists" got eigenvectors very quickly right off the bat in the pre-published book they used https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/course-in-mathematics-f...
After I dropped out of a theoretical physics Ph.D. program a long time ago, I decided to try to become a computer programmer. I had not taken a single computer science course in college. I was lucky that my parents allowed me to live at home for a year while I spent my entire time teaching myself programming. A friend told me to learn Scheme, so I went through all of SICP using my sister's Mac (I did not own a computer at the time). Then I started to learn C and Unix, hacked a bit with that, learned C++, and applied for jobs after doing some open source work so that I could have something to show. I got hired as a software engineer a year after I started my self-study.
I'm early in the stages of learning Clojure, so here's what I've done so far and what I plan to continue doing.
- I recently joined a local Clojure group on meetup.com and started attending meetings.
- I know the main web sites for the language, including a great searchable documentation site I use.
- I already know Scheme and Common Lisp, so my focus is on grasping the differences with Clojure.
- I just completed the Clojure koans I forked from GitHub.
- I started reading a Clojure book.
- I have played around with the REPL.
- I have started using a serious development environment including Leiningen.
- I will look into a testing framework to use as I experiment further.
- I have some specific tasks I want to try to implement in Clojure involving concurrency to get a feel for what I can usefully get out of this language.
- I'll look at people's code, of course, to get an idea of good and idiomatic practices.